Computer Interpretation of English Text and Picture Patterns

This paper considers a class of information sources consisting of text and pictures. The text i s English language text appearing in scientific and technical documents. The picture sources are the largely schematic pictures that occur in the same class of documents. However, the discussion is broadened slightly to include other picture sources. For a tiny fragment of English, the paper shows how the syntactic structure of text may be described, and then goes on to suggest that a similar analysis may be performed on the class of pictures under study. The description of these two kinds of information sources with a single class of descriptive techniques i s suggested as an alternative to the synthetic approach in which artificial languages are specified and then learned and used. The major reason for doing syntactical analysis of such sources discussed here i s that several information processing operations, amounting to the interpretation of the information sources looked upon as languages, can be done by the technique of syntax direction which uses the results of syntactic analysis to mediatq subsequent processes for manipulating the information tokens. The paper concludes with an illustration of an algorithm for matching the sentences given by a simple grammar against the class of simple pictures which these sentences purport to describe. N THIS PAPER w e shall consider as a single class of information sources that which is usually considered t o be two or perhaps more disjoint classes of information for information processing purposes. To exemplify this class of information sources, the information content of formal scientific and technical documents may be considered, even though in the present pre-systematic state of affairs, wc have no means of quantitatively and precisely speaking of t h e information content of documents (except in the communication theoretic sense which shah not be of concern here). It is, nevertheless , intuitively plausible that two kinds of information sources be recognized, v k , the textual matter of the documents (this paper shall be restricted to a consideration only of English text) and the pictorial matter. T h e text includes, but is not restricted to, sequences of Eng-lish sentences. Text is also understood here to include the quasi-textual matter contained in the format of documents and also contained in captions, labels, and the like. The pictorial information includes, but again i s not restricted to, the stylized schematic information that …